


they howl laughter to the stars

by volchitza



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, Pre Season/Series 03, Pre-Slash, light slash, very light, you almost need to squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-16
Updated: 2013-06-16
Packaged: 2017-12-15 04:19:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/845242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volchitza/pseuds/volchitza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eventually, his body learns to lean into Isaac's; Isaac's just naturally gravitates around Scott's, like it always did. (Eventually, initially, all at once) they grow accustomed to each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	they howl laughter to the stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beth!!!!](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Beth%21%21%21%21).



> A bit wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey; there's a timeline with other memories in between. Also, I've written this before the beginning of Season 3, so no spoilers for that.

Eventually, his body learns to lean into Isaac's; Isaac's just naturally gravitates around Scott's, like it always did. (Eventually, initially, all at once) they grow accustomed to each other.

 

 

"You know", Isaac says one night, sitting on Scott’s bed, "I want to tell you- I'm, I'm very grateful for what you're doing for me".

Scott's face lights up. ( _How very easy it is to please him,_ Isaac thinks, _it's like it shines through his face when he's happy._ He never voices his thoughts, however, because he's so used to having no one to care about them).

"You would do the same for me", he says, and Isaac's glad his answer is so simple and straightforward.

"Yeah, I would", he murmurs. "Though I probably wouldn't be as good as you in making it look like it's nothing". But those are not good words for what he means: he means that Scott's heart is open, and free, and his friendship is like a soothing balm for all of Isaac's wounds, and that he is so natural about everything he gives to others, not asking for anything in return, that Isaac wouldn't think it possible if he hadn't him. But he's not a good writer, is he? Never been too good with words outside of his head.

"What? Man, it's really nothing. And you're still sleeping on the couch, wait until you have a proper bed to thank me".

They laugh, and Isaac's heart becomes lighter.

 

 

"Is he the new Stiles?", his mom said when Scott asked her to let Isaac live with them, at least for a while. "What? Mom, no! Stiles' my best friend".

"And Isaac's just a friend? You want to let him sleep on the couch! _Our_ couch! Or is it a... pack thing?", Melissa inquired, narrowing her eyes.

"Oh my God, mom. Isaac- yeah, probably, it's a pack thing. It's a bit like we're family".

"Nice. Next time you acquire brothers, do tell me, since I'm your mother. It's only fair", she said, and that was that.

 

Isaac thanked Melissa with some flowers, because he thought it was what his mother would approve of, and the promise he would be almost invisible, and do dishwashing turns and everything. "I should expect so!", she said, laughing, and then she hugged him.

It was the first hug he received in so many years, he cried when he was alone.

 

"Hey, Isaac - I hope you're okay with it, but I asked mom if you could sleep at our place", Scott had said, promptly adding: "She said yes".

Isaac's mouth immediately opened in a wide, genuine smile; Scott responded with an equally enthustiastic smile. For once there was something good in Isaac's life, genuinely good, and he never doubted it one second, because it came from Scott.

 

 

He's never been this comfortable around anybody else before.

The first full moon together, they decided they would be their mutual anchors: focusing on keeping the other in track wouldn't let them go crazy themselves. That kind of thing creates a bond - both magical and personal, to which little can compare: it's made of the gentle scratches you give the other as a warning, and of patience, the number of breaths you take together, the feeling of the other wolf like he's a part of your own body, and the moon making the blood rush through their veins linking them as one.

Scott's claws leave marks on Isaac's arm, and Isaac shows him his bare fangs, ready to attack; but he hears the soothing heartbeat of the other, then Scott nuzzled his nose against his arm, like a wolf would do, meaning the scratches weren't meant to hurt.

"Did I hurt you?" Scott worriedly asks in the morning.

Isaac answers with a calm shake of his head, and a “thank you”.

 

 

They spend lazy nights out at the bowling, but it’s never as exciting as it used to be.

Lydia plays with her straw, keeping her thoughts to herself since Allison isn’t there; Stiles tries to make her laugh, but his efforts soon vanish into a blank, rejected expression. Scott is hurt by it, but he knows best than doing anything in front of others; so he stays his hand, and all instinct to console his best friend.

It’s Lydia who breaks the silence.

“So, you and Isaac go play Brokeback Mountain in the Sierra Nevada and leave me here alone with Stilinski?”, she asks, pointing to Scott and Isaac at the opposite side of the table.

“If you hate this town so fiercely, you could’ve gone to France with Allison”, Stiles replies, seemingly unaffected by her acid words, but too flat in his tone to Scott’s ears.

“Yes, of course, and ruin the whole point of her spending time alone with her father. Why didn’t _I_ think of that?”.

Stiles shrugs, looking away from her over his shoulder.

“Besides, I’m not fond of the idea of standing by as they talk of hunter stuff, no matter how attractive Chris Argent may be, or how boring Beacon Hills is”.

Stiles turns to his best friend, only half faking his outrage when he mouths to him: “Chris Argent is _attractive_?”, but Scott dismisses it, upset by the mention of Allison’s name.

Isaac moves forward, side-eyeing Scott and eager to change the topic. “We cannot bring Stiles, anyway. We have to train, if we want to have some hope of fighting this alpha pack-”

“ _Some_ hope?”, Lydia sneers. “I better start packing right now, if that is so”.

“Well, princess, if you’ve got better ideas, start talking”.

“How about you play against me instead? None of these _boys_ know how to throw a ball”.

 

Dinners at the McCalls’ are quite different from what Isaac was used to. First of all, they _talk_. They speak about what they did during the day, and Melissa - if she doesn’t have a shift at the hospital - always has some funny thing a patient said or did to tell.

He learns to care more about food, too - it was just something to fill his stomach with, before, but now Scott shows him how to cook properly, and Isaac’s quite the apprentice.

“You’ll be the cook in this house in no time”, Scott jokes one night as they wash dishes together.

Isaac’s elbow brushes against Scott’s arm, and his eyes fly to the point where their limbs touch; he hides how his stomach backflips in the tilt of his head.

“You’re tired of being in charge of the stove?”, he laughs.

“No, I’m tired of my own cooking. And your scrambled eggs are better than mom’s”, Scott replies, then adds into Isaac’s ear: “but don’t tell her I said that”.

 

They packed all the wrong things, of course, and they didn’t let Melissa help them - of course.

There are a few defining moments to the beginning of their trip: Stiles hugging Scott briefly, Melissa waving side by side with Lydia, the short walk to the car, the sun hitting the freshly-washed bodywork, the dry sound of the bags thrown into the trunk and that of the tailgate shutting close, similar to that of the doors, closing in short sequence. All these things hit a chord in Isaac’s heart, so used to cherishing the little sweetness life gave him, and they stayed with him. Then there was Scott’s smile and the map on the dashboard in front of him and his tennis shoes discarded on the floor of the car mat and the miles they had to go - reassuring, ordinary, dear things.

 

Scott chooses a stupidly cheesy radio station, broadcasting almost exclusively melancholic country ballads, alternated by some other, more lively songs.

To some they sing, when they know the words, to others they hum, and to others Scott taps on the wheel, only half thinking about the road.

Isaac watches the landscape, sometimes framed by Scott’s profile, when they talk or when he feels more daring or when a particular ballad comes on. Lyrics feel intensely poignant, or significant to him, and he feels as if he’ll never forget the words; but later he’ll only remember the feeling, and the sunshine, the weeping guitars through the old stereo system of Melissa’s car, and Scott’s hands on the wheel and the short-lived road.

 

 

To some extent, both know how to anticipate the other’s movements, now. Isaac isn’t sure if it is because of the nights spent running under the moonlight, or because they live together. Anyway, it feels like they fit: passing dishes to the other, moving out of the way when they’re in the bathroom, a million other little things during the day. (Later on, they’ll deliberately bump into each other, and laugh about it, and move one another by grabbing the other’s hips. But for now they still don’t lean into each other; they still haven’t fallen into the other’s gravitational field. There still needs to be time).

 

 

They go at each other with bare fangs, knock each other out, throw themselves carelessly into hopeless battles to harden, harden, harden their bodies. Scott and Isaac run miles in their wolf form, never looking back, learning to smell the environment rather than see what’s around them; they learn to recognise the acrid smell of the other’s sweat at a distance, they learn to ignore the burning ache of their muscles, they learn to breathe when their lungs hurt, and to run over wounded feet and hands.

They’re very alone in the woods, the green and red-brown woods, with water running through them and fresh shade where to rest under, but they don’t care for it. They grow comfortable in their own bodies in ways they’d never known, and so grow closer, as planets do.

 

 

They howl to the stars and it feels like singing; it feels like laughing.

 

 

One night during the time they spend in the mountains, as they lay side by side on their backs, two twin bottles of beer between them, Isaac thinks about it.

It’s not like he’s soft, or softened by his feelings for Scott. In fact, he’s quite vicious; he has felt a terrible, great brutality rush through his body: his muscles know it, and so does his heart, and his bones do as well. He has felt an unexpressed vitality burst out all at once; he has felt an inward explosion beneath his skin, he has felt what losing control is like. He has been like a wild animal, with uncontrolled energy forging him into beastly shapes.

If left to himself, he’d probably come to hate the sight of his own face in the mirror.

But Scott - selfless, noble, open Scott, a thousand things he’ll never be - by mere presence shaped him back into humanity; he still does every day, with his stupid smiles and attentive gestures.

 

 

“It’s so very easy to think the stars are there just for you, isn’t it?”, Scott asks, voice softened by the dark velvet of the night sky.

“Is it?”, Isaac echoes him. He has never thought the stars where there for him to begin with.

“Yeah. You lay on your back and you look up and all these dots of light, they’re beautiful, and alone, and for you to gaze upon them. Except maybe they got some other purpose, and they’re there since way before you, and they’ll be there long after we’ll be gone. So they’re not there for you. But they’re beautiful, in a soothing way. Do you know the feeling?”

Isaac turns to look at Scott, who’s looking at him, and after a while (how does time work? It flows slowly during these warm nights, like thick honey on a canvas, like it’s stretched out, like a gram of gold, like the wait between the drops of water falling from a leaking tap) he says: “Yes. I do”, but he’s not thinking about the stars.

 

 

“What was it? I mean initially”.

“I don’t know. I think I realized I was happy when, when Scott was near. Or happy with me, with what I did. You mean initially? That’s as far back as I can go. And then I would’ve thrown myself in a fire for him, you know? Just like that. I don’t know how it happened. I found myself in the middle of it”.

 

 

Summer is almost over, and a tension grows between them, silent and harsh - metallic.

The blood in their mouths has a sweeter taste, and the stark contrast it plays against the skin of their faces is terrible and splendid.

The scratches they give each other are not gentle anymore.

They are training for a war, but the terror they feel (cold and _metallic_ and standing behind the nape of their necks) is the terror of boys putting on their fathers’ armours and knowing, in the loneliness of their mirrors, they aren’t fit for battle.

 

“Do you feel as if we aren’t ready?”, Isaac whispers to the night in the tent, half hoping Scott is asleep, unaware of his fears.

“All the time”, is the answer, reassuring and throwing him in a new pit of desperation at once.

“What are we to do?”, he asks again, tilting his head against Scott’s.

“Try harder”.

 

The following day, Isaac falters beneath Scott’s blows. For the first time, he thinks, clear as day: _we’ll fall_. He thinks: _we’ll lose_.

He claws Scott’s arm in one last, forlorn tentative, and lets himself fall back to the ground.

 

_Pain. Light?_

 

“Isaac?”

 

_Pain. A blink._

 

“My God, you scared me”, Scott says, morphing back to his human form, still holding Isaac by his arms, against his body. “You really scared me”.

“I know. I can smell-”, he coughs, “I can smell the fear on you”.

They rest against each other for long, waiting for their wounds to heal.

Not all of Isaac’s do, not right away, so Scott takes them between his hands and heals them himself, over Isaac’s weak protests.

“I think I’ll fall asleep”, he says, and Isaac caresses the hair away from his forehead, “no more fighting”.

Isaac spends that time memorizing Scott’s eyelashes, and the strange shape of his jaw, the exact colour of his hands with all its hues, his parted lips, the calm rhythm of his heartbeat, the lines where the skin folds on his neck, which fingers are longer than which and by what lenght, the curve of his shoulders.

 

Isaac cooks them beans and game on the fire they made near the tent. The sound it makes is consolatory, with its crepitation and little pops and snaps and roars and splutterings, like whispering from the wood to the flames.

They eat in an unusual silence, minds roaming far and wide - some thoughts they have spoken before, others they have kept secret and silent.

 

They start a playful fight the way kids start a fire with the use of a magnifying glass; and like such fire, it grows from lazy to a frenzy in the blink of an eye.

In hindsight, Isaac thinks that Scott may have smelled it on him, the desire burning his bones, and reacted to it; in the heat of the moment, he only registered Scott’s lips brushing his, and his hips thrusting forward, and his ragged breathing mingling with the other’s. It’s where all the nights he spent restless because Scott’s knuckles were touching his thigh, or the other way around, nights they spent incredibly close even though there was space in the tent - it’s where they all come down to, to this point, but it still doesn’t mean half as much to Isaac as the moment when, weeks later, Scott will scratch the back of his head and say, nearly stammering:

 

 

“I don’t know, we could, we could, you know, there’s movies in theatres”.

**Author's Note:**

> please review! I've tried a new style and I'd like to know if it works :)


End file.
